Wed, 10 Apr, 12:45-14:00 / Room E1

Public information:
The dialogue between scientists, institutions, policymakers and the general public is widely recognised as an essential step towards a fair and sustainable society. Nowadays, more than ever in human history, international cooperation is an essential requirement for protecting the planet, advancing science and ensuring an equitable development of the global economy.
Despite its importance, the above dialogue can be a challenge for scientists, who often cannot find a productive connection with governments and politicians. Scientific associations are a key link between researchers and policy makers, as they have the potential to establish a durable and profitable connection with institutions.
The EGU elected the dialogue with society as one of its priority missions. At its General Assembly, the EGU is launching an innovative symposium format, Science and Society (SCS), to host scientific forums specifically dedicated to connecting with high-level institutions and engaging the public and policymakers.
The conversation with Ilaria Capua and Mario Monti will focus on science and politics with a global perspective, and the impact of populism on European integrity and therefore scientific research. The discussion will elaborate on optimal strategies to deliver topical and clear scientific messages to key institutions.
Ilaria Capua is a virologist best known for her research on influenza viruses and her efforts promoting open access to genetic information on emerging viruses. In 2006, Science reported on Capua’s effort towards open access science, stating that she had “renewed the debate about how to balance global health against scientists’ needs to publish and countries’ demands for secrecy". She has been a member of the Italian parliament from 2013 to 2016 and a fake news victim. She is currently a full professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, US, and director of the UF One Health Center of Excellence.
Mario Monti served as a European Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, with responsibility for the internal market, services, customs, taxation and competition. He was Prime Minister of Italy from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of national unity to cope with the Italian debt crisis. Monti has also been Rector and is currently President of Bocconi University in Milan. His publications deal mainly with monetary and financial economics, public finance, European integration, competition policy. He is currently lifetime member of the Italian Senate.
During the conversation, Ilaria Capua and Mario Monti will present their vision with two 15-minute talks that will be followed by 20 minutes dedicated to questions from the audience and answers.

Over two and a half days, the 2018-GIFT Workshop will explore a major theme of our geological past, through topical presentations from scientists at the cutting-edge of research, together with hands-on teaching activities, following the tradition of GIFT workshops.

Different classroom experiments will be presented relative to the programme of the GIFT workshop for teachers. Teachers will be split in two groups with two different topics for the hands-on.

This poster session presents novel approaches and new ideas for students and young people to appreciate the importance of science in their daily life. Teachers and educators need their knowledge base regularly updated with tools that will help their students critically evaluate scientific information transmitted via the media. The higher education system needs strategies to attract future scientists from across the globe to study the Earth’s atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and hydrosphere, and scientists from all disciplines need guidance on how best to interact with schools so their contributions can be valued.

Structural geology and tectonics are two of the most visual subjects in geosciences, and lectures on the subjects form the core of curricula at geology departments at universities around the world. New teaching styles and technologies have found their way into class room and field courses focusing on Structural geology and tectonic, such as Blackboard LEARN, flipped class rooms, classroom response systems, digital mapping on tablets, the use of drones, and virtual outcrops. We invite researchers and lecturers to present their original and innovative ideas, strategies and tools regarding teaching Structural Geology and Tectonics.

Games have the power to ignite imaginations and place you in someone else's shoes or situation, often forcing you into making decisions from perspectives other than your own. This makes them potentially powerful tools for communication, through use in outreach, disseminating research, in education at all levels, and as a method to train the public, practitioners and decision makers in a order to build environmental resilience. This session is a chance to share your experiences and best practice with using games to communicate geosciences, be they analogue, digital and/or serious games.

Modern research programs in Earth Sciences at European as well as international level are challenged by an increasing requirement for inter- and trans-disciplinarity, societal relevance, and educational outreach as well as market oriented applications. Projects and project managers need to adapt their strategies to these new demands and incorporate innovative, yet sound and coherent, project management practices. As key contact points of often large collaborative research programs, it is indispensable for project managers to have a credible forum with which to coherently exchange ideas on relevant practices and methodologies, learn about new developments on funder policies related to the science-society interface, and discuss how to enhance the project outcomes and impact. A close dialogue among research project managers and with key stakeholders is mandatory in order to ensure the effective use of the project results for higher societal impact and public awareness.

The session aims to bring together project managers from Europe and beyond, on an interactive discussion platform for exchanging knowledge, experience, and best practices for effective project management. Moreover, the session is also an opportunity for researchers to gain knowledge for the administrative part of projects and proposals.

This session is directed at project managers, coordinators, researchers, and project management practitioners in general who are keen to exchange experiences and increase their expertise through interaction with the European project management community. We invite contributions from all EGU scientific divisions and beyond, encouraging in particular those working with transdisciplinary projects where research meets the public, industry, and policy makers. Contributions are invited on a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, those addressing the following questions:

• How to design a project structure to optimise project implementation and impact?
• What are “best practices” in coordinating large international consortia?
• How can we maintain continuity of project management expertise with project managers mostly employed on non-permanent contracts?
• Which local, national and international networks of EU project managers exist, and are they useful?
• How to identify organisational pitfalls?
• How to deal with the project partners’ different priorities, e.g., interdisciplinary and academic-private sector?
• How to effectively engage non-research stakeholders to optimise project contributions?
• What project management concepts/procedures can be transferred from other sectors (e.g., industry) or social sciences (e.g., economics) to Earth sciences?
• What are the best tools for transferring knowledge from research to the private sector, decision makers, and the public in general?
• How can project results and impact be effectively disseminated to the wider community and how can their importance be highlighted to funding agencies?
• What lessons can be learned from “failed” projects?

Citizen science (the involvement of the public in scientific processes) is gaining momentum in one discipline after another, thereby more and more data on biodiversity, earthquakes, weather, climate, health issues among others are being collected at different scales that can extend the frontiers of knowledge. Successful citizen observatories can potentially be scaled up in order to contribute to larger environmental and policy strategies and actions (such as the European Earth Observation monitoring systems) and to be integrated in GEOSS and Copernicus. Making credible contributions to science can empower citizens to actively participate in environmental decision making, can raise awareness about environmental issues and can help bridge the science-society gap. Often, citizen science is seen in the context of Open Science, which is a broad movement embracing Open Data, Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Source, Open Methodology, and Open Peer Review to transparently publish and share scientific research - thus leveraging Citizen Science and Reproducible Research.

Both, open science in general and citizen science in particular, pose great challenges for researchers, and to support the goals of the various openness initiatives, this session looks at what is possible nowadays and what is ready for application in geosciences. Success stories, failures, best practices and solutions will be presented, in addition to various related networks. We aim to show how researchers, citizens, funding agencies, governments and other stakeholders can benefit from citizen science and open science, acknowledging the drawbacks and highlighting the opportunities available for geoscientists.

In this session, we are looking for successful approaches of working with citizen science and open science to bridge the gap between a multitude of stakeholders in research, policy, economy, practice and society at large by finding emerging environmental issues and empowering citizens. This session shall be an open space to exchange experiences and to present either successful examples or failed efforts. Learning from others and understanding what to adopt and what to change help the participants in their own undertakings and new initiatives, so that they become future success stories.

We want to ask and find answers to the following questions:
Which approaches can be used in Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences?
What are the biggest challenges and how to overcome them?
What kind of citizen scientist involvement and open science strategies exist?
How to ensure transparency in project results and analyses?
How to evaluate successful bridging of the science-society-gap?

Geoscience witnessed a flurry of major breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th century, leading to major shifts in our understanding of the Earth system. Such breakthroughs included new concepts, such as plate tectonics and sequence stratigraphy, and new techniques, like radiometric dating and remote sensing. However, the pace of these discoveries has declined, raising the question of whether we have now made all of the key geoscience breakthroughs. Put another way, have we reached “Peak Geoscience” and are we now in a time of synthesis, incremental development and consolidation? Or are there new breakthroughs on the horizon? If so what will these developments be?

One key remaining challenge is the management of the inherent uncertainties in geoscience. Despite the importance of understanding uncertainty, it is often neglected by interpreters, geomodellers and experimentalists. With ever-more powerful computers and the advent of big data analytics and machine learning, our ability to quantify uncertainty in geological interpretation, models and experiments will be crucial.

This session aims to bring together those with an interest in the future of geoscience. We welcome contributions from any field of geoscience which either demonstrate a new, disruptive geoscience breakthrough or provide insights into where the next breakthrough will come. We encourage contributions associated with uncertainty in geoscience models and data, machine learning or big data analytics.

Do you consider yourself a science communicator? Does your research group or institution participate in public engagement activities? Have you ever evaluated or published your education and outreach efforts?

Scientists communicate to non-peer audiences through numerous pathways including websites, blogs, public lectures, media interviews, and educational collaborations. A considerable amount of time and money is invested in this public engagement and these efforts are to a large extent responsible for the public perception of science. However, few incentives exist for researchers to optimize their communication practices to ensure effective outreach. This session encourages critical reflection on science communication practices and provides an opportunity for science communicators to share best practice and experiences with evaluation and research in this field.

If you look up the definition of outreach you are likely to find something along the lines of “an effort made by an organisation or group to connect its ideas or practices to other groups, specific audiences to the general public”. Much has been made of outreach taking an educational component, or moving towards a more two-way street in which outreach is considered as engagement rather than solely dissemination or teaching.
Research on successful outreach suggests that it will be more effective if the people you are targeting can see the relevance to themselves, and that narrower outreach targets are more effective than all-encompassing groups: If we try to create a message that speaks to everyone we will reach no one. But if we take one step back – what do we, as those trying to develop outreach activities, or respond to the compulsory aspect of outreach activities within our funded research, see as “outreach”?
For example, a scientist working on research that has an outreach component as part of the funding – do they see it the same way as museums arranging public talks or lecture series? Do science communicators see it the same way as those engaged with stakeholders? Has the term “Outreach” become representative of so many different activities that we no longer have a common dictionary or understanding of what we are trying to achieve within geoscience? Can we comfortably continue to sit in the middle ground between science policy (working with stakeholders), science education (designing classroom activities and games) and science communication (press releases and social media activities)?
In this session we would like to explore the definition of outreach and what it means to you, and so put outreach into context as an integral part of the research process. The convenors also want to address how we continue disseminating geoscience activities from international scientific programs such as IODP and ICDP.

The geosciences will play a major role in addressing some of the fundamental societal and economic challenges of the 21st Century. Delivering on this responsibility requires specialists from industry, academia and government to work together to effectively engage with various public stakeholder audiences. Recent examples of communication around high-profile contested geoscience industries have highlighted the need to engage with diverse public audiences early and openly, but this is often easier said than done. To ensure effective communication, and so to enable progress, geoscientists need to learn how to recast their knowledge into a citizen context.
This session will explore the challenges of communicating the controversial, high-profile and often increasingly politicised geoscience topics that are being discussed across Europe and the rest of the world, critique current practice and propose new strategies for public engagement in contested geoscience. We invite participants from across all sectors, including industry, government and social science, to submit abstracts on the communication of new and controversial geological topics; including geothermal heat or power, carbon capture and storage, geological energy storage, oil and gas extraction, radioactive waste disposal and mineral resource extraction. We are particularly interested in case studies and narratives that examine issues of risk perception, trust, the role of experts, participatory engagement, the concept of the social license to operate, public-led science and the co-creation of communications.

Those interested in submitting to this session might also be interested in the short course SC2.8: Science communication on hard mode: risk, uncertainty, disasters and controversies: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2019/session/30897

Natural hazards and the associated risk are in some cases a major hindrance to economic and social growth in economically developing countries. This is particularly evident for urban areas, since rapid and uncontrolled urbanization in hazard-prone regions may result in a significant increase in risk due to insufficient spatial planning, which sometimes does not correctly consider (if at all) the impact of natural hazards, and to inadequate building practices. This session will profile the challenges faced in the developing world when doing assessments of natural hazard and risk and designing mitigation strategies. Examples of these challenges include (i) a frequent lack of data, along with difficulties in collecting it, (ii) rapid and often unplanned urban development, with building practices often neglecting the potential hazards, (iii) less regulated nature-human interactions, (iv) limited resources and capacity to undertake the most appropriate prevention and mitigation actions and to actually respond to disastrous and extreme events, (v) climate change, and (vi) difficulties in communication between science, policy and decision makers, and the general public.
Submissions to this PICO session covering all relevant topics are welcome, including but not limited to: database and archive construction; modeling, monitoring and tools for natural hazard and risk assessment; conceptual understanding of multi-hazards and nature-technology interactions; response and mitigation strategies; and communications, policy and decision-making. We particularly welcome abstracts focusing on urban areas, as well as the participation of stakeholders to share their innovative theoretical and practical ideas and success stories of how risk can be understood and addressed across economically developing countries.

Geoscientists of all disciplines handle professional issues that have ethical, social and cultural implications. The ethical frameworks for research and practices, which help scientists of all disciplines to cope with ethical dilemmas and their societal responsibility, evolve steadily. Increasingly, geoscientists are aware of their ethical responsibilities - towards themselves, colleagues, society and the environment. Regularly, geoscientists put their knowledge at the service of society, communicate it effectively, and foster public trust in science-based solutions. Geoscience knowledge (and related expert advice) is vital for informed decision-making; hence the importance of education at all levels and capability building of citizens to participate at the quest and implementation of solutions to geoscience problems. As evolved during the last decade, Geoethics provides an open framework for such concerns, by discussing values underpinning appropriate behaviors and practices, wherever human activities interact with the Earth system.
Geoethics includes research integrity and professional deontology and the role of geoscientists in exploration and use of geo-resources (including water and soil) while meeting high standards of environmental protection. Evidently, geoethics deals with harassment, bullying and discrimination in the geosciences, e.g, on grounds of gender, ethnicity or disability. In fact these deplorable behaviors and the retaliation that can derive from them, compromise the freedom to follow ethical practices in one's profession.
Geoethics refers to the role of geosciences in the economic and social development of low/high-income countries, in sustainable development, in the defense of the society against natural risks, and the mitigation of the impact of human activities on human wellbeing and Earth system dynamics.
Geoethics relates with social sciences and humanities to further science communication, public awareness of geosciences, geo-education for the citizens, appreciation of geoheritage (and geoparks) to raise perception of the importance of Earth system for our lives and cultures.
Geoethics recognizes geosciences to be a public good that contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals, as recommended by the United Nations. Hence, geoscience insights shall be shared effectively for the benefit and progress of society. Therefore, geoscientists contribute to the handling of important societal problems, to grow public awareness and knowledge of the geosciences relevant to people’s lives.
The conveners invite abstracts on ethical, social and cultural implications of geoscience, including case studies. The aim of the session is to develop ethical and social perspectives on the challenges arising from human interaction with natural systems, to complement technical approaches and solutions, and to define an ethical framework for geoscientists' research and practice in addressing these challenges. Contributions from Early Career Scientists are encouraged, explicitly.

Following the success of previous years, this session will explore reasons for the under-representation of different groups (cultural, national and gender) by welcoming debate among scientists, decision-makers and policy analysts in the geosciences.

The session will focus on both obstacles that contribute to under-representation and on best practices and innovative ideas to remove those obstacles. Contributions are solicited on the following topics:

- Role models to inspire and further motivate others (life experience and/or their contributions to promote equality)
- Imbalanced representation, preferably supported by data, for awards, medals, grants, high-level positions, invited talks and papers
- Perceived and real barriers to inclusion (personally, institutionally, culturally)
- Recommendations for new and innovative strategies to identify and overcome barriers
- Best practices and strategies to move beyond barriers, including:
• successful mentoring programmes
• networks that work
• specific funding schemes
• examples of host institutions initiatives

This session is co-organised with AGU and the European Research Council (ERC).

In this session, led by the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), we invite contributions to explore diverse experiences with inter- and transdisciplinary research (ID-TD research), education and practice, as it is specifically applied in the mountain context. Taking mountains as complex social-ecological systems, they offer a concrete and spatially-defined context in which to explore how global change phenomena such as elevation dependent warming and climate change, land-use change, tourism, natural hazards, energy and social demographic change manifest and interlink simultaneously in these unique spaces. Addressing societal concerns and solutions with regards to associated impacts and implications for sustainable mountain development in response to these processes of change, requires an inter- and transdisciplinary approach to research and practice. We seek to convey and explore the mountain-specific challenges for this mode of research, education and training for IT-TD in mountains, as well as innovations to deal with these challenges. We also hope to foster a network and community of practice within the MRI, that offers a mountains perspective to IT-TD research and contribute to its theory, methodology and practice.

www.mountainresearchinitiative.org

Climate education is often underestimated, both in terms of the role it can play in meeting the challenges of climate change, and with regards the difficulty of delivering it effectively. Climate change poses not only interdisciplinary scientific challenges around understanding the problem, but also socio-economic, technological, ethical and political challenges to implement appropriate responses at local to global scales. To rise to these challenges there is a growing need for climate education approaches and resources that adopt integrative learning objectives and pedagogically effective practices. Key objectives of climate education include furthering learners’ content knowledge of climate science and options for action (e.g., climate feedbacks, impacts, adaptation measures, renewable energy), cultivating science and communication skills (e.g., quantitative literacy, critical thinking, writing to inform), and initiating positive attitudes and actions (e.g., empathy and behavioural change).

This session invites contributions on climate education and outreach across all age levels (primary, high school and adult), settings (formal and informal) and approaches (e.g., websites, lab demos, serious games, pedagogic research, course design, citizen science, filmmaking, art). Contributions related to upper primary and middle school levels and those concerning adaptation of technical scientific materials for teaching, are particularly encouraged. The session is an opportunity for educators, resource developers, pedagogical experts and scientists to network and share ideas and research on climate education.

Climate services challenge the traditional interface between users and providers of climate information as it requires the establishment of a dialogue between subjects, who often have limited knowledge of each-other’s activities and practices. Increasing the understanding and usability of climate information for societal use has become a major challenge where economic growth, and social development crucially depends on adaptation to climate variability and change.

To this regard, climate services do not only create user-relevant climate information, but also stimulate the need to quantify vulnerabilities and come up with appropriate adaptation solutions that can be applied in practice.

The operational generation, management and delivery of climate services poses a number of new challenges to the traditional way of accessing and distributing climate data. With a growing private sector playing the role of service provider is important to understand what are the roles and the responsibilities of the publicly funded provision of climate data and information and services.

This session aims to gather best practices and lessons learnt, for how climate services can successfully facilitate adaptation to climate variability and change by providing climate information that is tailored to the real user need.
Contributions are strongly encouraged from international efforts (GFCS, CSP, ClimatEurope…); European Initiatives (H2020, ERA4CS, C3S, JPI-Climate…) as well as national, regional and local experiences.

Cities all over the world are facing rising population densities. This leads to increasing fractions of built-up and sealed areas, consequencing in a more and more altered and partly disrupted water balance - both in terms of water quantities and qualities. On top, climate change is altering precipitation regimes.

This session focuses on according urban ecohydrological problems and approaches to solve them spanning from technical to nature-based solutions in different time and spatial scales from the building to the whole city.

Hydrology relies strongly on heterogeneous data sets and a multitude of computational models. However, several challenges remain in order to obtain all information from the data and model results and, at the same time, carry out scientific work that is reproducible and repeatable.

Data collection is generally the first step in the scientific process, but collecting spatially and temporally dense data sets can be challenging, especially in extreme environments, such as dry, humid or cold areas. Therefore, environmental data sets are often sparse and do not allow us to fully understand the hydrological and associated environmental processes dominant in these areas. Therefore, innovative ideas are needed to build methods able to extract information from the available data and make use of the many signatures in the observations that are still to be explored.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of heterogenous data becomes available from diverse sources such as remote sensing, social media or citizen science. Platforms and tools are needed to interpret such data, identify and understand patterns, trends, and uncertainty and to draw conclusions and implications from data-driven research. New methods for data visualization can be a pivotal for our ability to make new sense of heterogeneous data and to communicate complex datasets and findings in an appropriate way to other researchers and the public.

Eventually, the full scientific process should be open, reproducible and repeatable. Many data sets contain a wide range of derived variables that cannot be easily re-computed from the raw data, either because the raw data is not available or because the computational steps are not adequately described. As a result, very few published results in hydrology are reproducible for the general reader. However, more and more software tools and platforms are becoming available to support open science, partly as a result of collaborations between software experts and hydrologists.

This session invites contributions on topics ranging from data collection and visualization to sharing model code and reproducible workflows, e.g.:

- Platforms and tools for improved data visualization, open science, scientific collaboration and/or communication with a larger audience
- Use of innovative data and data collection techniques, with a focus on data sparse environments
- Case studies illustrating challenges and solutions related to open science
- Innovative types of data and their visualizations

This session is organized in cooperation with the Young Hydrologic Society (youngHS.com).

Liaising with stakeholders and policy-makers is becoming increasingly important for scientists to turn research into impactful action. In hydrological sciences, this is needed when implementing innovative solutions in areas such as river basin management, water allocation, impact-based hydrological forecasting, flood protection, drought risk management, climate change mitigation, ecohydrology and sustainable environmental solutions, among others.

The science-policy interface is not just as a way to increase the impact of our science, but it is also a scientific subject in itself. It presents several challenges to both scientists and policy-makers. They include understanding the different steps in the policy cycle: from setting the agenda to formulating, adopting, implementing, monitoring and evaluating polices. It is also crucial to know which facts and evidences are most needed at each step, so scientists can provide the best information at the right time and in the best way. Equally, appropriate science communication, where information is neither too complex nor infantilized, is key to open pathways to a more active and meaningful engagement.

The session will provide the opportunity for discussing with policy makers and addressing the necessary skills to facilitate the uptake of science in policy formulation and implementation: for instance, how science influences policy and policies impact science? How scientists can provide easily digestible pieces of evidence to policy-makers? What are the key gaps in joining science to feasible policy solutions in the water sector? How can we use knowledge to improve policy, and vice-versa?

We invite contributions that reflect on the needs of scientists and policy makers at different levels, from local, regional to EU and international levels. Hydrologists have long contributed to produce policy briefs and provide government advice on water-related issues. This session focuses on sharing these experiences (successes or failures), case studies, narratives and best practices at different phases of the policy-making process. It is also a platform for sharing tips and strategies to communicate scientific results and turn science into action.

Invited talk:
- "Flood management in a changing world: interactions between science and policy making", by Prof. Dr. Günter Bloeschl (Centre for Water Resource Systems, Vienna University of Technology)

The proper management of water resources is a key aspect of soil conservation in arid and semiarid environments, where any irrigation activity is structurally and deeply related to the understanding of soil hydrological behavior. In these areas, irrigation should be regarded to as an axle for oases and an effective defense against desertification. Its importance goes beyond the technological aspects, often being traditional irrigation a cultural heritage, which requires to be faced with an (at least) interdisciplinary approach which involves also humanities. On the other hand, improper practices may dramatically contribute to soil degradation. As an example irrigation may lead to soil salinization, with dramatic fallout on agricultural productivity, and overgrazing may lead soil to compaction, with negative effects on the soil capability of water buffering.

This session welcomes contributions ranging from the understanding of the soil hydrological behavior and of the mass fluxes, through the soil, in arid and water—scarce environments and also under stress conditions (e.g. water shortage, compaction, salinization), to the interaction between soil hydrology and irrigation, and to the design of irrigation systems in arid districts and oases. Particular attention will be given to the maintenance and improvement of traditional irrigation techniques as well as to precision irrigation techniques, also with local community involvement. Interdisciplinary contributions, which deal with different aspects and functions of the link between soil hydrology and irrigation techniques in arid environments, are encouraged.

Satellite data provides information on the marine environment that can be used for many applications – from water quality and early warning systems, to climate change studies and marine spatial planning. The most modern generation of satellites offer improvements in spatial and temporal resolution as well as a constantly evolving suite of products.

Data from the European Union Copernicus programme is open and free for everyone to use however they wish - whether from academic, governance, or commercial backgrounds. The programme has an operational focus, with satellite constellations offering continuity of service for the foreseeable future. There is also a growing availability of open source tools that can be used to work with this data.

This short course is an opportunity to learn about the data available from the Copernicus Sentinel 3 satellite, and then, with support from marine Earth Observation experts, to develop your own workflows for using data from the EUMETSAT Copernicus Marine Data Stream and Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service. The sessions will be interactive, using the WeKEO DIAS hosted processing, Sentinel Applications Platform (SNAP) software, and Python programming. No experience is necessary as various exercises will be provided for a wide range of skill levels and applications, however participants should bring their own laptops and be prepared to install open source software in advance.

State-of-the-art environmental research infrastructures become increasingly complex and costly, often requiring integration of different equipment, services, and data, as well as extensive international collaboration. Clear and measurable impact of the research Infrastructures is therefore needed in order to justify such investments (from member states and the EU) - whether it is an impact in terms of knowledge, developments in the environmental field of science, new innovative approaches, capacity-building or other socio-economic impacts. Moreover, improving the impact supports the long-term sustainability of the research infrastructures.

This session aims at discussing how to best monitor, interpret, and assess the efficiency and impact of environmental and Earth system research infrastructures. Even more importantly, the session seeks a breadth of contributions, with focus on ways to increase and improve the impact of research infrastructures, not only through the scientific outcomes they produce, but also, for example, through increasing the number of touchpoints with other actors in the society, or awareness of the services they offer- whether this is enhanced by lobbying, direct cooperation with industrial partners, or any other action. Talks on how to enhance the impact through the strategic communications activities are especially welcome.

Plastic contamination has been reported in all realms of the environment from the tropics to the polar oceans. The consequences of this contamination may be severe for ecosystems and could adversely affect ecosystem services such as fisheries and even human health. Our poor knowledge of plastics sources, their composition, sizes, pathways, hot spots of accumulation and ultimate fate prevents an assessment of environmental risks and the development of appropriate mitigation strategies. In order to understand current distributions of plastics and the way they evolve in space and time, much better observations and common consistent measuring methods are required but simultaneously, observations must be combined with computational models from their sources on land to rivers, estuaries, oceans and sea ice. This requires improved standardized accurate observations and the development of advanced modelling capabilities to quantify and predict contamination levels.

The session aims to set up a forum for multi-disciplinary discussions to create a global picture of plastic contamination in the environment and to suggest approaches for future research, monitoring and mitigation of plastic pollutions impacts. The session will provide a framework to advise legislators and industry on the best ways to reduce the risks of serious damage from this contaminant.

This session will draw together data on plastic contamination across all sizes of plastics, from nano- and micro-plastics to large plastic fragments, and across all environments and locations. It will combine observations with state-of-the-art computational modelling to promote the fast advance of research and improve our understanding of how plastic pollution affects environments worldwide. We invite contributions on new methods and field observations, laboratory experiments, novel modelling approaches, related scientific initiatives and projects. New ideas for citizen-science involvement and for mitigation strategies to reduce plastic contamination of the environment are especially welcome.

Invited speaker: Prof. Dr. Erik van Sebille

Natural stones are the main material used in architectonic heritage. Our session deals with those natural stone types that have achieved important use and significant recognition in human culture. Their recognition will promote public and policy-maker interest in stone built heritage, encourage the use of local natural stone and ensure the availability of the natural stone required for the maintenance of the built heritage and the quality of new buildings. This session is promoted by the Heritage Stones Subcommision, an IUGS subcommission within the Geoheritage Commission. It encourages contributions for the proposed thematic issue: natural stones and heritage and its potential application and information on possible stones from all over the world. We will as well accept contributions on issues related to the importance of using original natural stones in the restoration and conservation of historical buildings, and other issues associated with Geoheritage such as historical quarries and quarry landscape. This session will also emphasize the importance of Heritage Stones in the preservation of World Heritage sites.

Contributions from previous EGU editions are now published in highly rated journals; Geological Society of London Special Publications (SP407: Global Heritage Stone: Towards International Recognition of Building and Ornamental Stones), Episodes Special Issue on Heritage Stones (volume 38-2, June 2015), Geoscience Canada (volume 43(1), March 2016), Geoheritage (2018). Selected contributions to this EGU 2019 will be considered for publication in another Special Issue for a well rated journal.

Partial funding is available for registration and travelling expenses, through the UNESCO IGCP-637 "HERITAGE STONE DESIGNATION". Please contact convener for further details or visit our web site for details on eligibility: http://globalheritagestone.com/igcp-637/

It is becoming increasingly evident that both the scientific and the artist communities have a shared interest and responsibility in raising awareness of the limits to our planetary boundaries and the fragile stability and resilience of our Earth-System. In the past, this issue has been addressed mostly through traditional educational methods. However, there is mounting evidence that science-art collaborations can play a pivotal and vital role in this context by co-creating new ways of research and by stimulating the discussion by providing emotional and human context through the arts. This session, already in its fifth edition, has presented since interesting and progressive science-art collaborations across a number of disciplines, focused on presenting Earth sciences content. We have witnessed that climate change, natural hazards, meteorology, palaeontology, earthquakes, volcanoes and geology have been successfully presented through music, visual art, photography, theatre, literature, digital art, where the artists explored new practices and methods in their work with scientists but also where scientists have been inspired by artists in their research, and finally truly trans-disciplinary co-creation of Sci-Art work have emerged.